Challenges in clients’ cloud journeys
A discussion with Deborah Koens, regional head of cloud professional services at Amdocs Americas.
At the annual IT World Canada Digital Transformation Conference, ITWC chief information officer Jim Love sat down with Deborah Koens, the regional head of cloud professional services at Amdocs Americas, to discuss the challenges that organizations face in their cloud adoption journeys.
Article first appeared on IT World Canada.
Amdocs is widely known as a global provider of software and services to telecommunications and media companies, but the company now mainly describes itself as a global leader in transformation, Koens explained.
This, she added, can be attributed to the company’s increased focus on cloud at scale, especially in highly regulated industries, with its collaboration with the three hyperscalers: Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.
She noted that one area clients at Amdocs usually have challenges around is modernizing their security and bringing that to the cloud.
“It’s tempting to approach security the way that you’ve always done it. It can be expensive to change,” she said. “It can be overwhelming and intimidating, and it can be hard to justify that investment. And customers are very concerned about compliance, so they don’t necessarily want to touch what’s already working. However, if you don’t make those changes, and you don’t adjust for security in the cloud, you don’t necessarily get the benefits that you were looking for.”
Amdocs also seeks to not only help clients automate time-consuming and complex processes in their cloud transformation journeys, but also personalize that automation to really reflect what the client is doing, so that they see the actual value of that change.
“All of the things that allow a customer to do complex processes – that’s in our DNA..."
A lot of organizations are also struggling with moving their machine learning operations out of the sandbox and into production, Koens added.
“All of the things that allow a customer to do complex processes – that’s in our DNA, and so we take that combination of methodology and engineering and we bring it to machine learning. And really, I think that it’s going to serve us well as we move into this emerging discipline.”
However, Amdocs will continue to improve the overall digital experience of its traditional clients in the telecommunications industry, financial services, and more, Koens added.
“We have a passion for making people successful in the cloud. So we always say, give us your hard and crazy projects, and that’s the ones we want to work on.”
